CSA plant sale goodies!

Yesterday we went to the CSA plant sale to pick up some seedlings from Farmer Rich. I wrote a post last year about it, and about how I think it’s cool to buy from our local farmer instead of a big box store. It was nice to chat about what we’re growing, how the weather affects it, and just talk with the guy who grows the food I eat.

Mostly I like to get Farmer Rich’s herbs. I haven’t had the best luck with herbs, and his are so, so healthy. We do get herbs in our weekly share, but it’s usually just one herb, and I like to have the little herb garden so I can just walk outside and snip off whatever I need.

This is the variagated mint. Isn’t it beautiful the way the leaves change from green to yellowish and then back to green?

Here’s the mint potted in an old colander.

Here’s the herb garden in a new window box we picked up today…

In there we’ve got oregano, lemon basil (which smells so good that I got two, one to keep in the house), sage (not pictured, I put it in after this photo), thyme, rosemary, and parsley.

I also got eggplants again, and Tita Leonore asked for a pepper plant (we’ve both had serious woes with germination of peppers this year), so I got a golden pepper plant. And, when we got there, we had an impulse buy: brussels sprouts! They weren’t listed on the online order form, and I can’t wait to see them grow. They are so cool looking.

My peas are being actual peas! Despite the fact that I thought they were all going to die because they got so drowned in the storms, they are producing.

You can see that some of the plant got damaged from the overwatering, but if you look in the left half of the picture, you also see a peapod!

The carrots are also getting very serious. We are so tempted to pull one and see where they’re at. We’re going out of town this week, so that will alleviate some of the temptation for a bit, and I think when we get back it will be time to check one out.

There’s more work for me to do out there, but it was hot and I didn’t want to wear myself out. Next time…

Baggie alternative and a quick garden update.

Thought some of you might be interested in something I picked up at the store today:

Ziplock bags are a really hard habit to break. We use tupperware when we can, aluminum foil when we can, cloth bags when we can, and we’re a lot less picky about things being in bags than we used to. What’s a little dirt sometimes, right? But when you grew up in a house where disposable baggies housed everything from peanut butter sandwiches to dry cereal to lego pieces, sometimes, you just feel like it’s the right solution.

So, when I saw these natural waxed paper bags, I figured that they’d be good to have around. There are occasionally times when it’s just not practical to carry a tupperware around with you, and these certainly seem like they’d biodegrade faster than plastic, though I don’t claim to have any scientific data off the top of my art school brain. (Nor, I should mention, am I affiliated with the company that sells this product in any way… I just thought they were nifty and I bought them with my own three dollars and nineteen cents.)

There you have it. Here’s a tiny garden update. Everything is drowning despite my best efforts to cover it. I think the carrots are doing ok, but I might lose the peas. However…

I went out in the rain this morning and snapped this photo:

In the foreground there’s the first of the corn coming up! I’m hoping the rows aren’t too crooked from the strong rain washing things away. You may be wondering what the plastic knife is doing in the ground… well, we don’t use disposable flatware that often, but on a rare occasion, we do. Then, we save the knives to use as veggie markers!

We’re supposed to get some sunshine with our rain this week, so perhaps someday the conditions will improve. Until then I’ll be hiding away drinking tea and making soup.

Filipino Garlic Fried Rice

Fried rice is a great dish when you’re running low on food, you want to clean out the vegetable drawer, you’re broke, or you don’t want to do a lot of dishes. It’s not complicated and has pretty basic ingredients, but it’s really delicious. Tonight we had a little bit of the first and the last happening. We didn’t want to make anything super laborious, but we wanted a homecooked meal since we’ve been getting a lot of takeout due to Charlie’s hectic work schedule. I even got those green onions that I showed you that are growing in the garden.

Charlie tells me that his mom always used to make this when there was leftover rice in the fridge. It was often a meal made for breakfast, but sometimes for dinner. Tita* often made it after making something like pork chops, where there were lots of drippings left in the pan. This version is vegan, but if you feel like it, you can fry an overeasy egg and throw it on top, letting the yolk get all gooey in the dish. It can stand alone as a meal, as we had it tonight, or be served as a side dish.

This dish is a little healthier than your standard fried rice because we used brown rice and a TON of vegetables. When we make fried rice or stir fry, the vegetables to protein & starch ratio is pretty ridiculous. We probably had about 6-7 cups of veggies, a scant 3 cups of rice, and I don’t know what you’d call a package of tofu, 2 cups? Anyway, the important thing to note about this is that fried rice is like stir fry and stone soup. Almost any vegetable you have will do. I’ve written down what we used in what quantities so that you have an idea, but certainly, if you have 4 cups of broccoli and 2 cups of snow peas and no carrot and you have no idea what a kohlrabi is, just go with it. My advice on this matter is to try to cut everything to roughly the same size, unless you know that it cooks drastically differently, and to separate your vegetables into two bowls: Stuff That Cooks Slowly, and Stuff that Cooks Really Fast. It will be awesome, I promise.

*That’s what I call Charlie’s mom – it’s the Tagalog word for “aunt,” but it’s used as an affectionate term for female family friends or other ladies who are around your parents’ age.

Ingredients

5 (or more) garlic cloves, minced
1 small onion, chopped

Veggie Prep Bowl 1:
2-2 1/2 cups of broccoli, finely chopped (about 1 large floret)
1 1/2 cups of carrots finely chopped
1 medium kohlrabi, peeled and finely chopped

Veggie Prep Bowl 2:
1 cup of snow peas, cut in half
1/2 cup yellow squash or zucchini, chopped a little bigger than the other stuff since it’s softer (you could do more, but Charlie likes it less than I do)

Total Vegetables: about 6-7 cups, chopped into small pieces

2-4 cups cooled white or brown rice (day old rice is perfect for this)
1 block of extra firm tofu, drained, pressed, and cubed
a generous handful of green onions, snippped into pieces with scissors
soy sauce
salt & pepper to taste
garlic powder (optional)

Directions

Heat a large pan (nonstick is best) for a few minutes until it is hot, then add a few tablespoons of vegetable oil. Place the tofu cubes into the pan. Flip and stir frequently. Cook until the outside texture is crispy and brown. Remove the tofu from the pan and drain on a paper towel.

Drain some of the oil from the pan, leaving just a coating. Saute the garlic and the onion for 2-3 minutes or until the onion is soft. Add the broccoli, carrots, and kohlrabi. Do not add the squash and snow peas yet or they will get soggy. Cook for about 5 minutes or until tender, depending on the size of your pieces, stirring occasionally. Add the squash and snow peas, cooking for 2 minutes or until the snow peas are bright green and the squash is soft. Add the rice and cook for 2 minutes or until it is heated through. Add pepper and soy sauce to taste. If necessary, add salt and garlic powder to taste.

Garnish with the green onions.

A momentary pause from the rain.

It’s been nothing but rain here for quite a few days, and will be for quite a few more days to come. The garden needed the rain, but not this much! I’m just thankful that we’re not in an area where rising rivers are threatening our homes. Friends near the Mississippi, we’re thinking of you.

Speaking of the garden, some of the veggies are just getting more beautiful every day. We’re also probably only a few weeks away from getting deliveries from Farmer Rich, so that’s exciting, too.

Here’s the broccoli and peas in the bottom bin, and carrots in the top bin.

The peas are actually starting to get a couple of flowers on them!

The apple tree is getting more and more leafy each day…

The chives in the yard are beautiful and flowering a gorgeous lavender color.

I didn’t even realize it, but the green onions from last year got put in the ground, and they’re up again.

Here’s the first look at the burgundy beans…

And here’s a picture of my rogue tomatoes, if that’s what they are…

I sowed a whole bunch of corn, but it hasn’t come up yet, as well as the soybeans, but I’ll just try to wait patiently until the weather sorts itself out. Until then…

Gorgeous weather for gardening.

The weather in the tri-state area has been just gorgeous lately. We spent most of the weekend sitting outside on the back deck, enjoying the greenery that has finally decided to appear on the trees (as well as getting a nosefull of pollen!).

The container garden that I’ve started is mostly doing quite well. The kohlrabi can’t decide whether it wants to live or die. The lettuce and spinach did die while I was in New Orleans, but I resowed it and hopefully we’ll have that come up. All of the tiny tiny seedlings that were in the trays inside didn’t make it (due, it would seem, to someone in the house, I won’t name names, wanting to be helpful and watering a bit too much). But, just about everything did ok outside, so I haven’t had to replace much. The only thing I really had a hard time with was the peppers, and I’ve started them outside again this week.

The carrots are doing wonderfully. And take a look at the broccoli and peas! Can you believe it?

Also, in the short week that I was in New Orleans, my apple tree (that looked little more than a skinny stick in a bucket of dirt when I left) grew a whole bunch of leaves! Check it out!

It’s warming up enough here to start sowing some stuff directly into the ground. We’re still not sure what our plans are for moving, but since we live with my partner’s mom, who also likes gardening, we can always just leave her a yummy harvest if we find a great apartment mid-summer. So, Sunday, I put in a short row of soy beans and a short row of royal burgundy bush beans.

We started talking about plans for a triangular trellis for the sugar baby watermelons, which I started inside today. Another summer treat we’ll have is corn. Today, I sowed about a 3.5′x3.5′ patch (I know that Charlie is going to tell me that I’m way off in my estimate, since I’m terrible at them) of corn. I have space on either side of the patch to do more corn, too. One of the sections needs to be cleared of forget-me-nots and weeds, and the other is ready to go. I’m planning to plant the corn in succession so that we don’t have a glut all at once. So, in two or three weeks, I should be ready to plant the next patch of corn. I may also plant my pumpkins over there, both because there would be room for them to vine and because they give important nutrients to the corn. We’ll see – it’s early for that.

I actually planted a handful of flowers, too. Usually I stick to veggies, but I had a wildflower mix that I decided to toss in a window box, and I’d gotten some painted daisy seeds from the seed library. I was planning to plant them in a pair of old polka-dotted rain boots, but they’re MIA at the moment, so I started them in pots that would set just about properly in the boots, and I’ll look a little harder for the boots in the next few weeks.

One last funny note about the garden. As you might have read, we had some hoop houses to keep the kale warm when it was very chilly. Well, I uncovered the hoops when I got home from NOLA, and the kale was doing ok, but I had some really healthy looking tomato plants, perfectly spaced out! It was pretty funny. I used compost to get that area going, so there must have been a few seeds that snuck in that our wormies didn’t process. They look so healthy that I think I’ll let them grow! With any luck, they’re seeds from the heirloom tomatoes we get in our CSA share.

Carrot Cake with Bourbon Cream Cheese Frosting

Charlie’s birthday was last Sunday, but Sunday, we were at the tail end of a 30+ hour train ride from New Orleans back to New York. Our trip was delayed a bit because of the tornado in Alabama. We actually rode right through Tuscaloosa, AL, and the damage was just incredible. It was super sad and almost unbelievable to just see huge trees absolutely snapped in half. If you’d like to help the folks out in Alabama, one way you can do it is by texting FOOD to 27722 to donate $10 to the West Alabama Food Bank.

Now that we’re back in New York, and I’ve spend the week resting and doing laundry and other mundane stuff, it’s time to catch up on Charlie’s birthday. We had about four pounds of carrots from our last winter CSA delivery, so a carrot cake was certainly in order.

As usual, when making this recipe, I looked at a whole bunch of different carrot cake recipes and then mishmoshed them together, though I’d say the one that was the closest to what I was looking for was over at The Joy of Baking. I still made a bunch of changes, including reducing the amount of raisins and nuts and pineapple and making a spicier cake, since those are things that (if I recall correctly!) I’ve heard Charlie say he prefers in a carrot cake.

Charlie’s mom was around when I was baking this cake, and I let her taste the batter. She made a noise of exclamation. “What did you put in this?” she demanded. “It’s going to smell so good,” she said. She went to the kitchen window and started to open the window, then looked back at me. “That way the neighbors can smell it and be jealous,” she smiled.

Usually when I bake, it’s all about the flavor and nothing about the presentation. Friday night, though, I took a nap while the cake was cooling, then got a second wind and baked a whole second cake! I decided to really spend some time decorating the carrot cake while the chocolate chip cake was in the oven. The decorating didn’t come out perfectly, since it got to be two in the morning, I was getting sleepy, and the sequence that I did certain things in was not necessarily the most efficient, but it came out pretty darn nice.

I almost never write on cakes [the last time I did was probably last year's super silly birthday cake for myself, when I couldn't even find the tip for writing] so I was really, really happy with how the script came out. I took a half dozen semesters of typography in college, so I would have been gutted if my cake lettering was awful.

I think I’m getting the hang of this baking thing. *wink*

Photo of the cake topped with drunk raisins, drunk pineapple, and drunk ginger.

Ingredients

1 1/2 cups oil
4 large eggs
3/4 cup granulated white sugar
3/4 cup brown sugar
1 tablespoon pure vanilla extract
1 pound carrots, shredded (about 3 1/2 cups shredded, or about a dozen small carrots)
1/3 cup walnuts, chopped
1/2 cup raisins
2 teaspoons chopped candied ginger
2 tablespoons finely chopped pineapple (optional)
a few tablespoons of flavorful bourbon (I used Woodford Reserve)
2 cups all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
3/4 teaspoon salt
1 tablespoon ground cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon nutmeg
3/4 teaspoon cardamom

Ingredients: Cream Cheese Frosting
(sorry, I just kind of flung things into the mixer on this one!)

2 bricks of cream cheese
3/4 stick of butter
2 cups (or more, according to taste) confectioners sugar
2 tablespoons bourbon (I used Woodford Reserve)
2 teaspoons vanilla bean paste
toasted coconut (for garnish)

Directions

Carrot Cake: Several hours before beginning, make the “drunk raisins.” I learned this tip from a new friend when we were out in New Orleans – thanks, Darnell! Place the raisins and ginger (and pineapple, if desired) in a small bowl. Add a small amount of bourbon – enough so that the fruit is covered. Let it soak for at least an hour, preferably more. Reserve a few tablespoons of this mixture for the decorating step.

Preheat oven to 350 degrees F and place rack in center of oven. Spray two 9″ cake pans.

In a medium bowl, whisk together the flour, baking soda, baking powder, salt, ground cinnamon, nutmeg, and cardamom.

In bowl of a stand mixer mixer (or with a hand mixer), beat the eggs until frothy (about 1 minute). Gradually add the sugar and beat until the batter is thick and light colored (about 3 – 4 minutes). Add the oil in a steady stream and then beat in the vanilla extract. Add the flour mixture and beat just until incorporated. With a large rubber spatula fold in the grated carrots, drunk raisins (don’t forget to reserve some!), and chopped nuts. Evenly divide the batter between the two prepared pans and bake 25 to 30 minutes or until a toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean.

Remove from oven and let cool on a wire rack. After about 5 -10 minutes invert the cakes onto the wire rack and then cool completely before frosting.

To assemble: place one cake layer onto your serving plate. Spread with about half the frosting. Sprinkle nuts, ginger and raisins if desired. Gently place the other cake onto the frosting and spread the rest of the frosting over the top of the cake. If desired, garnish with toasted coconut around the sides of the cake. Cover and refrigerate any leftovers.

Note about decorating: If you’re like me, and you prefer a much less sweet frosting, your frosting won’t be as stiff. What I did was frost the cake with the thinner icing, then, for the remaining 1/3 or so of the frosting, I added an extra cup or two of confectioners’ sugar. That way, the frosting was stiff enough to pipe the letters and the edge, but the entire cake wasn’t sickeningly sweet.